A telephone wire runs along the edge of the lane by my house. It’s just on the far side of the drystone wall that encloses a buttercup encrusted field which slopes down towards the river. From my kitchen window I can watch swallows sitting on it in a chattering row, and then fly off, swooping across the meadow. 

At the top of the lane there is a huge sycamore tree. The telephone wire threads through its lower branches. The bole is so big that it juts out of the drystone wall into the lane, which makes it rather unpopular with delivery drivers who have to edge past carefully. There is a tree preservation order on it, so it’s there until it falls over on its own accord.

The swallows fly round and round the tree, so it must be full of insects. I did a bit of research and discovered that although sycamores do not host a great number of species of insect, an extraordinary number of aphids live on them. The aphids suck sap from the sycamore and because there is more sugar than they need, they excrete the excess, as anyone who has parked a car underneath one in the summer will know.

My friend in London has a sycamore on the edge of the road outside their house and they’re careful to avoid it. Here in the dales, the lane next to my house is either dust or mud, depending on whether or not its been raining, so you can’t see the sugar deposits, but you can see the swirling flock of swallows catching the multitude of aphids in mid-flight. 

I’ve been reading Sherlock Holmes stories and it struck me that sugar deposits from a London street tree sycamore might make a good clue, if there were street sycamores in London at the end of the 19th century that is. “How did you know that Holmes!” “Watson it was perfectly plain to see that the man’s black patent leather shoes had splashes of sycamore sap that indicated not only precisely where he had stood, but for how long.”

The reason I’ve been reading Sherlock Holmes stories is one of those Moodscopey sort of things. Oli mentioned hypnosis, so of course I instantly thought of Sherlock Holmes. Now, here’s the interesting thing. There is a film called ‘The Woman in Green’ about Sherlock Holmes and hypnosis, but I can’t remember a specific actual Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes story that mentions hypnosis.

I suppose you can imagine where this is all leading. 

I then find a second-hand bookseller on the internet who has copies of the original Strand magazine containing the Sherlock Holmes stories. They are surprisingly cheap, so I order them and within two days they are in my hands. The bindings are a bit rough, but it’s the stories I’m after. A shelf of bound Strand magazines is also quite an interesting addition to my library.

As a backup I want to listen to the audio books, but I’ve cancelled my Amazon and Audible subscriptions for political reasons. But am delighted to find out that my local library has audiobooks completely free of charge including the Sherlock Holmes stories. Why had I even bothered with Audible before! Some of the stories are out on loan, but I’ve already listened to the ‘A Study in Scarlet’ and put in a loan request for the others.

I’ll explain the psychotherapy reason for the Sherlock Holmes trigger in another blog post. I’ve only just worked it out, so am on a voyage of discovery there. But the question in this blog is: do you get obsessive and fixated on a particular topic and get driven to drill deep into it? Or perhaps you make use of your MH superpower in other ways? It might be regarded as a classic MH OCD symptom, but strangely it actually makes me good at my job so has its uses. So, there are benefits from MH if they can be harnessed and brought under control. The downside is of course the periodic bouts of depression and anxiety that need to be managed.

Rowan on the Moor

A Moodscope member

Article about sycamores and aphids:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/08/country-diary-in-praise-of-the-low-value-sycamore-tree